NBA: Brown squares off with mentor for first time

Sixers coach Brett Brown walks along the bench during a game earlier this season. Brown got his first chance Monday to coach against the Spurs Gregg Popovich, for whom Brown was an assistant coach before coming to Philadelphia. (AP Photo)

PHILADELPHIA — Brett Brown shared a bench with San Antonio coach Gregg Popovich for more than a decade. Monday night, they shared smiles from opposite sides of midcourt.

The 76ers’ first-year coach, Brown got his first crack at matching wits with Popovich, his professional mentor, when their teams met at Wells Fargo Center. Doing his best to play down the moment, Brown repeatedly said facing Popovich and the Spurs was no different than any other game on the Sixers’ schedule.

Oh really?

“(Brown) has a lot of respect for Coach Pop, and I’m sure it’ll be a cool for them to look across at one another and smile,” said Sixers shooting guard James Anderson, who played for Popovich from 2010-12, when Brown was on the Spurs’ bench.

Monday didn’t offer just another game for Brown, whose tenure as a San Antonio assistant coincided with an impressive 11-year run during which the Spurs won three league titles and no fewer than 50 games in any season. Moreover, the matchup of the Sixers and the Spurs was an opportunity for Brown to glance down the court at Popovich, from whom he’s gleaned more than a few Xs and Os — and beyond.

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They met for dinner Sunday night, and met before tipoff for a handshake and a few laughs.

“You steal from everybody, but I’ve stolen the most from Pop,” Brown said. “You think that formula is pretty good, and you steal as much as you can and try to apply it to your team and drip-feed it in with what you’ve done in the past. It’s a hybrid of all of that, but far more tilted to what I learned from Pop.

“He’s a friend. He’s been very good to me. I enjoy his company. We go way beyond basketball.”

Brown said he and Popovich have spoken at least three times a week since Brown accepted the Sixers’ offer in early August to become their head coach.

Brown came to Popovich with head coaching experience after five seasons with an Australian club. Brown started with the Spurs as a guest coach, the equivalent of an unpaid intern. Nonetheless, Popovich gave Brown a voice and treated him as an equal.

“He knows how to put people together,” Popovich said. “He knows how to build the box, he knows how to not skip steps. He knows patience. So when I first met him, he already had those skills. I learned as much from him as he learned from me.”

It’s a bond not easily broken and neither are those that he forged with the players he’s coached.

The urge, of course, was for Brown to coach up the Sixers on guys with whom he’s overly familiar, guys like Tony Parker and Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili. That, Brown said, would be a mistake in judgment.

“You have to hold yourself back,” he said. “(This game) is not that dramatic. It really isn’t. You have a bunch of games and this one is different. I admitted that. … You can’t help but feel a little different. It’s where I spent all of my NBA days, arguably one of the greatest influences on my life with Pop.

“But they will provide no favors or relief.”

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Sixers center Daniel Orton was available against the Spurs after sitting out two in a row with what was termed right knee soreness. Orton tweaked the knee Nov. 6 against Washington.

“It’s close to 100 percent,” Orton said. “They said it was a slight sprain. Nothing crazy. They said it’s knee soreness because it’s not that bad to classify it as a sprain, but that’s what it was.”

Also on the injury front, San Antonio did not use Tim Duncan. Popovich said the Spurs were resting Duncan in the second game of a back-to-back scenario.

“He’s not injured,” Popovich said of Duncan, who played 24 minutes Sunday at New York.